The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp

Hussam, Reshmaan; Kelley, Erin; Lane, Gregory; Zahra, Fatima

doi:10.1596/1813-9450-10138

“…Providing opportunities for elders to maintain or rebuild their (perceived) ability to contribute to society could be an important way to strengthen purpose, dignity, and thus mental health. For instance, offering (non-elderly) refugees work has meaningful benefits for their psychosocial well-being including reduced depression beyond the cash value of this work (Hussam et al 2022). Similar benefits could potentially be achieved for the elderly in low-income contexts through interventions that involve them in child care or provide some suitable work opportunity.…”

Section: Psychosocial Interventions To Reduce Depression and Lonelinessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Depression and Loneliness Among the Elderly Poor

Banerjee¹,

Duflo²,

Grela³

et al. 2022

1

0

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for excellent research assistance. We thank Miriam Sequeira for her insights. Financial assistance is provided by the NIA under grant number P01AG005842, and by the Tamil Nadu Government under the J-PAL-TNAGE partnership partnership. Many thanks to Aparna Krishna, of J-PAL, and Mr. Krishnan, of the Tamil Nadu government, for getting this partnership off the ground and overseeing the start of this project. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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“…Crépon et al (2013); Behaghel et al (2014). This literature also includes some recent evaluations of public employment schemes for India (Khera, 2011;Muralidharan et al, 2017;Banerjee et al, 2020), Ivory Coast (Bertrand et al, 2017), and Malawi (Beegle et al, 2017), and an evaluation of the psychosocial value of employment in Rohingya refugee camps (Hussam et al, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Employing the unemployed of Marienthal: Evaluation of a guaranteed job program

Kasy¹

2020

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials

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We evaluate a guaranteed job program that was piloted, starting in October 2020, in the municipality of Gramatneusiedl in Austria. This program provided individually tailored, voluntary jobs to all long-term unemployed residents. Our evaluation is based on three estimation approaches. The first approach uses pairwise matched randomization of participants into waves for program adoption. The second approach uses a pre-registered synthetic control at the municipality level. The third approach compares program participants to observationally similar individuals in control municipalities. These different approaches allow us to separate out direct effects of program participation, anticipation effects of future participation, and municipality-level equilibrium effects.We find strong positive impacts of program participation on participants' economic (employment, income, security) and non-economic wellbeing (social status, time structure, social interactions, collective purpose). We do not find effects on physical health, or riskand time-preferences. At the municipality level, we find a large reduction of long-term unemployment, and a slightly attenuated reduction of total unemployment. Comparing participants to similar individuals in control towns, we obtain estimates that are very close to the estimates from the experimental comparison. There is evidence of positive anticipation effects in terms of subjective wellbeing, status and social inclusion for future program participants, relative to ineligible control-town individuals.

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“…Crépon et al (2013); Behaghel et al (2014). This literature also includes some recent evaluations of public employment schemes for India (Khera, 2011;Muralidharan et al, 2017;Banerjee et al, 2020), Ivory Coast (Bertrand et al, 2017), and Malawi (Beegle et al, 2017), and an evaluation of the psychosocial value of employment in Rohingya refugee camps (Hussam et al, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Employing the unemployed of Marienthal: Evaluation of a guaranteed job program

Kasy¹

2020

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We evaluate a guaranteed job program that was piloted, starting in October 2020, in the municipality of Gramatneusiedl in Austria. This program provided individually tailored, voluntary jobs to all long-term unemployed residents. Our evaluation is based on three estimation approaches. The first approach uses pairwise matched randomization of participants into waves for program adoption. The second approach uses a pre-registered synthetic control at the municipality level. The third approach compares program participants to observationally similar individuals in control municipalities. These different approaches allow us to separate out direct effects of program participation, anticipation effects of future participation, and municipality-level equilibrium effects.We find strong positive impacts of program participation on participants' economic (employment, income, security) and non-economic wellbeing (social status, time structure, social interactions, collective purpose). We do not find effects on physical health, or riskand time-preferences. At the municipality level, we find a large reduction of long-term unemployment, and a slightly attenuated reduction of total unemployment. Comparing participants to similar individuals in control towns, we obtain estimates that are very close to the estimates from the experimental comparison. There is evidence of positive anticipation effects in terms of subjective wellbeing, status and social inclusion for future program participants, relative to ineligible control-town individuals.

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The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp

Cited by 4 publications

References 39 publications

Depression and Loneliness Among the Elderly Poor

Depression and Loneliness Among the Elderly Poor

Employing the unemployed of Marienthal: Evaluation of a guaranteed job program

Employing the unemployed of Marienthal: Evaluation of a guaranteed job program

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